Over Vitry, Bishop spotted a red Albatros two thousand feet below; he waggled his wings as a signal to the rest of the flight and dived. From sixty yards he fired a burst of twenty rounds, then to the right he saw another Albatros coming out of a cloud. As he turned toward it a flock of six Albatros fighters dived out of the overcast. It was Bishop’s baptism in Richthofen’s tactics. Seconds later bullets ripped into the rear of his fuselage. He pulled up sharply into a loop. When he levelled off he saw an Albatros on the tail of one of the Nieuports, pouring bullets into it. Slowly the machine faltered, then fell dizzily in a half-spin through the clouds below, carrying Garnett to his death.
Bower saw the sharp nose of an Albatros closing behind him and tried to turn out of its line of fire, but he wasn’t quick enough. A bullet lodged in his stomach and he fought unconsciousness in an effort to stay in the battle. Then his engine started to vibrate as other bullets smashed into it. Coaxing his engine to keep him aloft, Bower headed back toward his own lines. Still fighting blackout, he glided through a barrage of anti-aircraft fire and landed on a field near Chipilly, behind his own lines. He managed to climb out of his machine, then fainted from loss of blood. Next morning he died.
60 Squadron sector in 1917
Bishop and the other three pilots now found themselves under attack by six Albatros fighters. The ten machines whirled in circles, each trying to get into position to open fire. The mêlée of planes gradually lost height until all were in danger of ending the battle on the shell-pocked earth.
Finally the Germans broke off the fight. They were within gliding distance of their own aerodrome near Douai, where the Richthofen Jagdstaffel II was stationed. But Bishop and his three companions were in a serious situation. They were twenty-five miles behind the German lines; the fight had brought them down to one thousand feet, within easy range of anti-aircraft and machine-gun fire, and there was the danger that fresh planes might take off from the Douai aerodrome.
The gale from the west had increased. Flying homewards in the teeth of it, their speed was cut to fifty miles an hour. This made them perfect targets for the ground gunners, and shells began bursting all about them.
Using the clouds as cover, darting out of one and into another, they managed to reach Filescamp Farm. Their machines were shredded with bullet holes and shrapnel. The whole action had lasted an hour and a half, and the rest of the patrol regarded it with some amazement. Late in the afternoon Colonel George Pretyman, commander of the 13 Wing under which 60 Squadron operated, came over to the aerodrome to congratulate Bishop on leading a remarkable patrol. Bishop was not only surprised but embarrassed that a sortie in which he lost two out of six members should be regarded as “remarkable.” “You can be certain we didn’t do it on purpose,” he told Jack Scott bitterly.
No narrative of this marathon patrol can convey the drama of the almost illegible pencilled note that Jack Scott scribbled at the bottom of the report that Bishop turned in when he landed at Filescamp: “At 1.20 P.M. Lieut. Bower and Garnett have not returned.”
The next day Bishop won his second aerial victory, over one of Richthofen’s squadron, while the four surviving pilots of his patrol were escorting photo reconnaissance planes ten miles northeast of Arras at fifteen thousand feet. He reported it tersely: “I went to the assistance of another Nieuport being attacked by an Albatros scout. I opened fire twice, the last time at fifty yards range. I saw my tracers hit his machine in the centre section and the Albatros seemed to fall out of control in a spinning nose dive.” Bishop got double confirmation of this kill. Second Lieutenant L. H. Leckie noted, “I was behind Lt. Bishop and saw the Albatros go down.” Jack Scott jotted on the report with his usual brevity: “The above is confirmed by anti-aircraft battery.”
Bishop’s report by no means told the whole story. Actually he had gone to the assistance of Townesend, his RMC classmate, when the latter was surprised by two Albatros scouts. Townesend was shot down and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, and one of the photo reconnaissance planes was destroyed, but headquarters congratulated Bishop for “bringing five of the planes home safely—the photographs were a huge success.”
April 1, 1917, was the first day of the bloodiest month the war in the air had witnessed. Both sides threw more planes into the air—and lost more—than in any similar previous period. On opposite sides of the trenches, Bishop’s 60 Squadron and Richthofen’s Jagdstaffel II bore the brunt of the fighting, and the score favoured the Germans by a wide margin. Richthofen shot down twenty-two planes during “Bloody April”—seventeen of them two-seater observation planes.
Bishop’s score was twelve—all but two of them single-seater scouts that outgunned and out-powered Nieuports, and were manned by pilots who had many more hours of combat experience than Bishop.
On the afternoon of April 7, Bishop got his third Albatros—and his first sausage balloon. The big tethered gasbags that both sides used for observing the effects of their own artillery fire and the movement of enemy troops had seemed unworthy targets to Bishop. But Caldwell, whose wisdom and experience had made him the oldest survivor of 60 Squadron, had warned Bishop that balloons could be “the nastiest lot of all.”
Not that Caldwell was a cautious man. On the contrary, he was “a wild New Zealand fire-eater,” as one of his squadron mates put it, and the top morale-booster of the outfit. Only a few days before he had got into a dogfight with the redoubtable Richthofen at twelve thousand feet, in which both pilots had shot holes into each other’s planes with near-fatal results.
What Caldwell had discovered was that the balloons, tethered by a cable at two thousand feet, were at an ideal altitude to be defended by “flaming onions”—whirling balls of fire hurled into the air by a rocket device. When a balloon was attacked, the ground crew would quickly winch it down and meet the diving enemy plane with barrages of rifle and machine-gun fire. In addition, enemy scouts had a habit of circling behind cloud cover above the balloons and darting down suddenly on a plane bent on attacking the “sitting sausage.”
“Always be sure the chaps in the balloon’s basket are alive, not dummies,” Caldwell told Bishop. “The Hun has a trick of filling the basket with high explosives and detonating it from the ground when you dive in.” (The Allies, incidentally, employed this device too, and probably used it before the Germans did.)
Soon after Bishop took off from Filescamp to attack his first balloon, Colonel George Pretyman telephoned Jack Scott from 13 Wing headquarters: “Dammit, Scott,” he barked, “one of our observation balloons has just been shot down. Do something about it.”
“We are, Sir,” Scott assured him. “Bishop is on his way over to get one of theirs.”
“Good God!” said Pretyman, “You don’t think. . . .”
“I hope not, Sir,” said Scott fervently.
Bishop was not guilty. He was at that moment attacking a balloon which, to judge from the bullets and balls of fire that whizzed by his wing tips, was definitely not “one of ours.” As Bishop dived through this hair-raising hail of bullets and flame balls he heard the rattle of machine-guns behind him, felt his Nieuport shudder, and turned to see the snout of a red Albatros that was methodically chewing his tail planes with its twin Spandau guns.
He took the only evasive action possible. He pulled the nose of his Nieuport straight up in an almost vertical climb. The Albatros, taken by surprise, roared past underneath. Bishop quickly brought down the nose of his plane and found himself only fifteen yards behind the Albatros. At that close range he fired a burst of twenty rounds. The Albatros lurched on to its side, its nose went down and it crashed almost vertically into the ground.
Bishop now turned his attention to the balloon once more. During the few moments of the aerial duel, the balloon’s crew had frantically winched it down, and now it was only five hundred feet up and descending as fast as the crew could reel it in. Bishop had orders not to attack under one thousand feet, but he had no intention of abandoning his quarry now. He aimed his pl
ane’s nose at the descending balloon, opened his throttle, and pressed the firing button. His Lewis machine-gun chattered as incendiary bullets poured into the gasbag, but without apparent effect. When he was fifty feet from the target—and little more than three hundred feet from the ground—Bishop came out of his dive. His engine sputtered and stopped.
It was the second time in a few days that Bishop had undergone this horrifying experience. But this time he was a little wiser. Corporal Walter Bourne, his ack-emma (aircraft mechanic), had tipped him off on how to correct the oiling up of the Le Rhône engine after a fast dive. With a very few seconds remaining before his wheels would touch earth, Bishop slowly pumped his throttle. One of the nine “jars” of the engine caught, then another and another. Twenty feet above the ground the Nieuport was alive. Bishop headed for home with throttle wide open. He was too low for anti-aircraft fire, but it seemed that every German soldier within sight had a rifle or machine-gun trained on his plane.
When he finally reached the British trenches he looked back. A mass of smoke and flame arose from behind the German lines. His sausage had finally caught fire. That afternoon Jack Scott received a wire: “Congratulate Bishop on fine feat today. Trenchard, General Officer Commanding, Royal Flying Corps.”
But there was little cause for rejoicing in 60 Squadron that night. While Bishop was downing the balloon and the Albatros that afternoon, a patrol led by Alan Binnie had run into Richthofen’s Jagdstaffel II near Mercatel south of Arras. Three pilots had been lost. Richthofen, promoted to the rank of captain that day, had led the attack himself, bringing down his thirty-seventh victim, nineteen-year-old Lieutenant George Smart from Manchester, who was killed when his machine crashed in flames. In the same fight M. B. Knowles was shot down and taken prisoner and C. S. Hall was killed in mid-air.
It brought the total casualties of the squadron for the first week of April to five. V. F. Williams had been killed on the second day of the month just after returning from leave, and Townesend was shot down behind the lines and captured.
That night Bishop wrote a bitterly emotional letter to Margaret: “Three more pilots lost today. All good men. Oh how I hate the Huns. They have done in so many of my best friends. I’ll make them pay, I swear.”
The Germans were, however, taking only partial revenge for the devastating night bombing attacks on Richthofen’s base at Douai by 100 Squadron, also stationed at Filescamp Farm, adjacent to Izel-le-Hameau village. Richthofen wrote after the second raid: “I was in bed fast asleep when I heard, as though in a dream, antiaircraft firing. I awoke to find the dream a reality. One of the Englishmen was at that moment flying so low over my quarters that in my sudden fright I pulled the blankets over my head. It would be too silly for a flying man to die by a rotten bomb.”
Actually in two nights 100 Squadron dropped ninety-eight bombs on Richthofen’s headquarters, destroyed four of his hangars, killed or wounded several of the German pilots and ground crews, smashed the landing field so it could not be used for several days, and damaged or destroyed many planes, including Richthofen’s favourite red Albatros.
On the night of April 7 the Germans tried to return the compliment by bombing Filescamp Farm. Bishop, like his enemy counterpart Richthofen, found he was more nervous at being at the receiving end of a bombing raid than facing sudden death in plane-to-plane combat in the daylight skies. His remarks, by coincidence, were a close paraphrase of Richthofen’s.
Bishop was in much less danger, however, as most of the German bombs fell harmlessly in fields. The aerodrome was hard to detect at night, as the only landmarks were the road and railway line which ran four miles to the north. Bishop’s disturbed sleep did not prevent him from turning out for the dawn patrol. It was to be the greatest day in his life up to that time.
SEVEN
ACE
IT WAS EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 1917. The early sun was slowly burning off the night’s mist as Jack Scott hobbled to his Nieuport, balanced himself by gripping the edge of the cockpit, handed his canes to a mechanic, and was boosted aboard by a member of the ground crew.
Scattered white clouds drifted lazily from the east as Scott led his patrol across the German lines near Vimy Ridge. For twenty minutes the flight criss-crossed the lines before Scott spotted an Albatros two-seater, far below. He dived and fired a short burst, but the German machine quickly dived away. Bishop, suspecting a trick, chased after it.
What happened during the next few minutes was described in the report Bishop wrote before 60 Squadron sat down to its Easter Sunday noon dinner:
I dived after Major Scott on a two-seater opening fire twice as he was already diving. Then I engaged a single-seater. He flew away eastward after I had fired forty rounds at him. Tracers hit his machine in fuselage and planes. I then dived at a balloon from 5,000 feet and drove it down to the ground. It did not smoke. I climbed to 4,000 feet and engaged an Albatros scout, fired the remainder of my drum at him, dodged away and put a new drum on, and engaged him again. After two bursts he dived vertically and was still in a nose dive when about 500 feet from the ground. I then climbed to 10,000 feet and five miles N. E. of Arras I engaged two single-seaters flying toward our lines. Three more machines were above and behind. I fired the remainder of my drum into the pair, one burst of 15 at one and the rest at the other. The former turned and flew away with his nose well down, the second went down in a spinning nose dive. My tracer bullets hit all around the pilot’s seat and I think he must have been hit. Then I climbed and got behind the other three about the vicinity of Vitry. I engaged them and one, a double-seater, went down in a nose dive but I think partly under control. I engaged the remaining two and finished my third drum at them. They both flew away eastward.
How many planes did Bishop shoot down on that Easter Sunday? Some of his squadron mates insisted it was five; others claimed they saw four planes crash. Jack Scott said, “Let’s not be greedy—let’s settle for three.” Bishop shrugged. The three official victories brought Bishop’s total to six. This, in the French system of scoring, made him an “ace”—plus one.
The French introduced the “ace system,” according the title to a pilot who downed five enemy planes. The Germans required a score of ten for “ace” status. The Americans at first used the French score but later raised the requirements to ten. The British, characteristically, stayed aloof from such things, and even when Bishop had registered seventy-two victories he was never officially referred to as an ace.
Corporal Walter Bourne’s jaw dropped when Bishop landed his plane at Filescamp and crawled out of the cockpit, pale and dizzy. Bourne shook his head in disbelief. The Nieuport’s fabric was riddled by bullet holes. The windshield was splintered, and the point at which the bullet entered it seemed to be directly in line with the pilot’s head.
“How,” asked Bishop’s mechanic, “could a bullet hit there without hitting there”—and he tapped Bishop’s flying helmet.
“Oh, it grazed me,” said Bishop, showing a groove in the leather of his headgear. “By the way,” he added, “keep that windshield for me.” It was one of the few souvenirs Bishop took back to Canada when the war was over.
When Bishop had departed Bourne called to his assistant: “Carstairs! A can of blue paint!” The hangar mechanics heard, and were electrified. The last time the corporal had demanded a can of paint was when he had decided to honour 60 Squadron’s greatest pilot, Albert Ball. Bourne’s accolade had taken the form of painting Ball’s propeller spinner red. Now the ack-emmas crowded around while Bourne solemnly applied the blue paint to the special spinner they fixed to the hub of Bishop’s propeller. It was cone-shaped and appropriately vicious in appearance.
Jack Scott was propped against the door of his office as Bishop came in. “I’ve phoned old Boom Trenchard about our O.P. [offensive patrol], and he insists on coming over,” said Scott. “Better get into a clean uniform.”
“Old Boom Trenchard” was none other than General Sir Hugh M. Trenchard, officer commanding the Roy
al Flying Corps. (His nickname, obviously, arose from the fact that the general’s voice could traditionally be heard a mile away.) When he arrived at 60 Squadron’s mess he embarrassed Bishop acutely by declaring in a voice Bishop was sure could be heard clear to Izel, “My boy, if everyone did as well as you’ve done, we’d soon win this war.”
Trenchard stayed for the celebration 60 Squadron staged that night and, mellowed by a generous amount of the Squadron’s best champagne, watched benignly as Bishop, equally thoroughly lubricated, performed a tap dance on the piano and recited the airmen’s favourite ballad:
Oh the bold aviator was dying
And as ’neath the wreck-age he lay, he lay,
To the sobbing me-chanics about him
These last parting words he did say:
Two valves you’ll find in my stomach
Three spark plugs are safe in my lung, (my lung).
The prop is in splinters inside me,
To my fingers the joy stick has clung.
And get you six brandies and sodas
And lay them all out in a row,
And get you six other good airmen
To drink to this pilot below.
Take the cylinders out of my kidneys
The connecting rod out of my brain, my brain,
From the small of my back take the crankshaft
And assemble the engine again.
Bishop was roundly booed for his performance, and General Trenchard himself advised him, “My boy, stick to flying.” Bishop blamed the pianist, Alan Binnie, who in turn blamed the piano. It was, he complained, “dried out.”
“We can’t have a dry piano in this mess,” said Bishop, and poured a quart of champagne into the instrument. It was three o’clock in the morning before the weary, happy celebrants made their way to bed for a few hours’ sleep before dawn patrol.
On that day, 60 Squadron found itself in a new role—as a direct arm of the ground forces. Until now the work of the air force had been co-ordinated with the overall offensive and defensive tactics of the ground forces in the plans of the commanding officers, but not in ways that were obvious to the airmen. They understood in a general way the need to knock down observation balloons and planes that came over to photograph troop movements and military installations. But most of the time the rank and file of fighter pilots had a somewhat vague knowledge of what the “poor bloody infantry” was up to. Essentially they were fighting a private war in the skies.
The Courage of the Early Morning Page 8
